Huawei provides value and is not bothered by controversy

This interview was done much before the reports that said Huawei India executive director Sethuraman had resigned from the company

BANGALORE, INDIA: A Sethuraman, executive director, Huawei Technologies India in an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL talks about why Huawei is not bothered about controversies, what makes India an exciting market for the company and many more. Excerpts:

CIOL: Huawei has been mired in controversy over device security in several countries. Your take on this.

Sethuraman: Huawei has been a transparent company. People, who say that Huawei can be a security threat to India because the country does not have any stringent rules to check such activities, can always come and verify their doubts.

People invest billions of dollars with us. They do not mean to throw that money away, nor are they buying any Chinese toy. There is a notion that Chinese toys are not good, however, every Chinese product is not a toy. Our Global security officer is from UK and he serves the UK government.

Cyber security is a global issue. The network is vulnerable, no matter wherever it comes from. So, architecture is very important. Just because a particular equipment comes from a country of a particular origin and raise, it does not mean that they are rogue.

Every business has challenges. Everywhere, when a new player comes, there will be such doubts raised. As long as we are transparent and open and give business value, Huawei will overcome them.

CIOL: Where do you see growth coming from in India?

Sethuraman: Broadband is bringing a lot of business opportunities, be it in terms of setting up backbone networks, micro wave networks, or LTE networks. We also see a lot of shift happening in creating broadband network infrastructure. There are still a lot of scope in voice penetration, especially in rural areas. Indian Government has set target that by 2020 there will 100 per cent voice penetration in rural areas. So operators are look at enhancing their existing network.

And, in terms of broadband, we have about 10 per cent penetration today with 15 million subscribers. The government aims at 600 million by 2020. So there will be investments around them as well.

CIOL: Is the broadband target achievable?

Sethuraman: In the past, such doubts were raised with regards to voice penetration as well. There were critics who even said Indians cannot afford mobile phones. Today we have exceeded all targets.

Similarly, it is possible in terms of broadband also. There are bottlenecks in terms of infrastructure and network. For wireless infrastructure, we have spectrum and access network, however, we lack when it comes to backbone network. For a network to transfer information it should be of high capacity, and for high capacity networks you need fiber.

Another challenge is in terms of covering rural areas because of issues such as alternate energy, availability of grid power, high cost of network and energy etc.

CIOL: How do you look at India's 4G market, which has not been able to pick up?

Sethuraman: Adoptability of any technology takes time. Remember how television, electricity, and mobile phones took time to penetrate. Building network infrastructure is not just about creating a 4G access network infrastructure and believe that will solve the issue. The ecosystem has to be built. There is no use if 4G is restricted to a particular area because your information might come from a server that is located at a different area where 4G is not available. So a high capacity backbone network has to be built through out the country in-order to establish an information highway.

Similarly, there is also a need for applications that can make a difference to people's life and which people would like to access. Broadband can be used for remote education programmes, e-governance or remote healthcare. Operators are implementing 100Gbit and 40 Gbit networks.

We have set up manufacturing unit in India. We also have our R&D here and centre of excellences also. We are looking at India as a long term market.

CIOL: Reports say that one reason why Huawei could grow so fast is because it sells products at low price?

Sethuraman: It is a wrong perception. We create value, which includes device price, support cost, life-cycle cost, feature functionality, better experience etc. We bring the latest technology, feature functionality, which helps customers to market the service faster and have faster return on investment. We are in CDMA, GSM, WCDMA, LTE, 2G, 3G, 4G, so we can give them the value proposition which others cannot.

CIOL: Huawei began its enterprise and consumer businesses about one and two years back respectively. How have been the journey and how tough was it to take on established players in these segments?

Sethuraman: Our share in the enterprise segment is still small. However, when we started out carrier business also we had several established players. Despite that we are a prominent player there today. Similarly we plan to create value to consumers as well.

We were the first to launch quadcore mobile phones. In the consumer space, Nokia used to rule this market once upon a time. Then Samsung came and then came Apple. Can Huawei also become like that? Why, not. Earlier, we used to have Ericsson and Motorola handsets, which are not there anymore. Things can change rapidly. Huawei has a vision, but only the time will tell whether we will be successful.